Wasabi/Mustard Cashew Nuts

Another simple recipe, also inspired by my visit to the cashew nut factory and it's range of flavoured cashew nuts. This is how to flavour cashew nuts with wasabi, the fierce mustard like hotness, that the Japanese use to flavour sushi and sashimi. Wasabi can be bought in dry powder form, and like this it can be used to season cashew nuts. You can't use wasabi paste for this, but if you can't get wasabi, you can use mustard powder which produces a very pleasant alternative with many of the same nose burning hotness!

Preparation
1. As with yesterdays Tom Yum cashew nuts, dry fry the nuts to brown them. This takes a few minutes over a low heat, watch them carefully, keep moving them around so they don't burn in one place, and turn off the heat as soon as they're toasted. Be careful, there can be enough residual heat in the pan to burn the nuts, even after the heat is off.
2. Add a teaspoon of oil and mix this with the nuts in the pan, so the nuts are completely covered with a thin film of oil.
3. Sprinkle with salt, and taste them. You can salt them at this stage to your own preference.
4. Leave to go cold. I can't emphasize this enough, wasabi loses it's strength when it's heated. You must let the nuts go cold before seasoning with the wasabi powder.
5. Once they're cold, take a sieve, put a half teaspoon of the wasabi powder in the sieve and tap the powder over the nuts, turn them over and tap the remaining powder over the other side. The sieve is to prevent lumps of wasabi powder which are unpleasant to eat.
6. Taste and add more wasabi powder if it's not strong enough.